President’s Desk: Encouraging Students to Be Active Leaders
Community college administrators can get bogged down in the day-to-day activities of running a college and don’t have as much interaction time with students as they would like. Although student success is at the forefront of what we do, students may be relegated to an absent or abstract role in decision making. Thankfully, NHTI has intentional strategies to ensure that this does not happen.
Our students elevate our institution through the work that they do; the teams they participate in; and the projects that they embark on. Our students are woven into the very fabric of all that we do and they are the heart of our institution both supporting us and challenging us to be more innovative and aspirational. The president of Student Senate sits on our College Council, which is our formal shared governance decision-making structure. Students are appointed members of our CCSNH Board of Trustees. They participate in important committee work including our Strategic Enrollment Management and Student Engagement teams. They are part of our workforce as work-study students. They are decision makers in Student Senate.
Our NHTI students provide us with examples of their grit, fortitude, and ingenuity each and every day. We witness their challenges and their joys – their very transformation from being shy, quiet thinkers to vocal leader advocates. This transformation is not unusual at NHTI because we make sure that leadership opportunities abound.
- Our summer Lynx to Leadership program for incoming students blends dynamic trainings, teambuilding activities, and hands-on civic engagement to encourage and empower students to be active leaders, both on and off campus.
- Our newest leadership opportunity for students is NHTI’s membership in the National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS). NSLS is the largest national leadership honor society and offers many benefits for our students, including scholarships, certificates of completion, access to national speaker broadcasts, and leadership conferences.
- Students are invited to join our award-winning Phi Theta Kappa, an academic Honor Society.
- They can become residence hall assistants and club leaders and get involved in student government.
We know that our work at NHTI includes learning outside of the classroom and we ensure that this happens through our programming and ongoing assessment of the success of these programs.
Our students are everybody. They are high school students and freshly minted high school graduates; they are laid-off workers retraining in new fields; they are office workers prepping for promotions; they are retirees who wants to keep their minds engaged. Our students are veterans, ESOL, indigenous peoples, single moms and dads – all with varied experiences, backgrounds, and skills. Students are you and me. Our students are the community and this is what makes our work and our classrooms so enriching and the integration of student voices so incredibly important! Blending ages, experiences, gender, races, and cultures into our decisions elevates our work with beautiful multiplicity.
Whenever I need a smile or a pick-me-up, I always talk with our NHTI students! They remind me what NHTI is all about.
